Today's post is an excerpt from this morning's Zoom talk, "Something More". If you are interested in attending the Sunday talks, add your email to our email notification list at: hillsideew@aol.com
What I am considering here is that basic things like appetite and life satisfaction and wanting something more, are not separate from the spiritual aspect of wanting something more. There is a need for more within the fundamental nature of the human species. And yes, it is influenced, if not hijacked by commercialism and culture, which includes religious teachings. Another factor of the human reach for something more, especially with aging, is the problem of mortality. This life as we know it, does end. And the 'I' that we know and live as 'here' is displaced. I leave the door open for what that means, because to me it is an unknown; I have my speculations, along with all of you. But so much of life has been unknown, we have all lived with the unknown.
We just don't usually focus on it, but we stretch a bit toward it, toward a something more.
Perhaps all the 'something more' quests in our lives are simply inquiries, expeditions, into the unknown.
Yes often we may want more of something known, but what we don't know is what is our limit. Sometimes we are pushed to discover the limits. William Blake wrote: "The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. You never know what is enough until you know what is more than enough." What are the limits of life? In Buddhism, the emphasis is not so much desire itself, the wanting, and possessiveness, as it is coming to terms with the impermanence of form. The other aspect of that is that new forms are constantly coming into manifestation."You say goodbye, but I say Hello." Something else is always forming. That is the joy of life.
"He who binds to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy, He who kisses the joy as it flies "Lives in eternity's sunrise." (Blake) https://poets.org/poem/eternity
The sun is always setting and the sun is always rising. Life and death are simultaneous processes. Blake thought God manifested himself in Man through the divine quality of human imagination; the true freedom for humans is the freedom to create. And that resonates with some streams of New Thought as well as other thinkers: we are instruments of a creative process that we cannot fully grasp... The Something More I'm talking about this morning is the something more that arises out of the same source that appetite arises, a natural need to be filled by reaching toward more. . . To understand who you are, is to discover something more. To come to understand what is here, is always something more than what you understood before. That's why paying attention to your wants is important. (Susan Nettleton)
Some of the poetry from this morning: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.../mind-wanting-more
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/.../poems/40900/missed-time